[Discussion]Unlimited bandwidth

Okay so I was wondering about Unlimited(unmetered) bandwidth offered by almost all hosting Companies...
So my question is after how many GB's you start getting errors of page loading, unable to load, Internal errors etc etc...

Just want to start this discussion, so that people get aware of hosting companies

P.S. Post your GB's of bandwidth you use per month.

One model for such offers is to give 3-5 TB traffic and then to reduce the speed from 100 to 10 Mbit/s. That's the model I usually encounter.

There's no such thing as unlimited anything. There is always a clause that if you're over average or using too many resources that they can boot you. "Unlimited" is simply a marketing term... it always has a limit and you'll find out what it is the day you go over it and they suspend your account.

Unlimited and unmetered are not considered the same thing in transit/transport.
A company offering unlimited will disable your account at probably around 200-300 gigs. A company offering unmetered will sometimes take action after a few terabytes of transit.


To give some perspective, an unmetered 1gbps line will normally be about $4000/month. Price varies depending on location.

OldSalt said:

There's no such thing as unlimited anything. There is always a clause that if you're over average or using too many resources that they can boot you. "Unlimited" is simply a marketing term... it always has a limit and you'll find out what it is the day you go over it and they suspend your account.

Click to expand...

That's my point, there is nothing like unmetered...
My question is, after using how many gb you people run out of bandwidth...

That should be detailed on the terms of use of the webhost service you're buying. I don't think all companies have the same limit. But yes, for me all this is misleading advertising.

Yeah, any normal webmaster really shouldn't have a problem unless you are hosting some serious stuff.

Personnally we do offer unmetered for some of our plans. There is nothing to hide so here is the explanations :

It means for us that we monitor the bandwidth overall a node, a server or a cluster. We have a regular usage trend and a variance allowance. It leads us to take action only if the variance from the trend is way too big. In that case we would contact the customer to know if the usage is going to be permanent.

We use the unlimited term mainly for shared hosting. In that case it is straight forward. We won't take action for insane amount of traffic. However, we would for sky high CPU / RAM usage which would affect all the users. Of course there is a correlation between traffic and ressources..

Also, as it has been said there is no such thing as completly unlimited. It is like when you go in a restaurant with unlimited soda / or fries, the owners know you would consume such amount of liter of soda or such amount of plates of fries. THere can be some oddity but overall marketing wise it is profitable.

To come back to the hosting field, don't expect to pay a couple of bucks with a respectable company for a use that you can have on a VPS or a dedicated .

There is no "unlimited" bandwidth at 100mbps or 1000mbps, talking always for "regular" prices except if price is 10x up/
You can find only unlimited outbound, which mean upload but no way download.
On the other had you can find unlimited inbound, which mean download at 10mbps.

At my company I provide with 2TB per plan, and if they exceed they just drop at 10mbps, ther is no VPS suspension. Most customers of mine uses scrapebox, which is a tool that needs lot of bandwidth, in my server 24x7 and in end of the month noone have exceeds 2TB.

Thanx guys for your replies...

Actually, there is nothing called unlimited.
Normally, even 100mbps unmetered lines have a limit of 33TB.

breathhacker said:

Actually, there is nothing called unlimited.
Normally, even 100mbps unmetered lines have a limit of 33TB.

Click to expand...

Yeah....

100mbits/sec = 12.5 mbytes/sec
31 days = 2678400 seconds
Do the math and that will be 34603008 megabytes or 33 terabytes.


I'm not sure if you knew that when posting but the main concern was not about speed limitations but company limitations.

OldSalt said:

There's no such thing as unlimited anything. There is always a clause that if you're over average or using too many resources that they can boot you. "Unlimited" is simply a marketing term... it always has a limit and you'll find out what it is the day you go over it and they suspend your account.

Click to expand...

This is the best answer and most accurate you'll going to get. Except they will probalby try to upsell you to their dedicated plan instead of ban your account.